Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 603

Editing the Past

There is a common-sense view of time—it moves from the past (which cannot be changed), to the fleeting present (in which I am now acting), to the wide-open future (which does not yet exist, but into which I aim my projects). I am told that physics since Einstein has made this view quite obsolete and is being replaced by increasingly bizarre conceptions of reality, which I cannot understand or imagine. Specifically, the past may not be unchangeable at all but may be affected by events taking place right now (if possible by me; I have a list of priority items). However, even short of these mysterious possibilities, the past is not all that unchangeable. It is intermittently being “edited”, both by individuals (who re-invent their biographies) and by collectivities (who develop changing “narratives” of what supposedly happened in their past). Historically and even today, many of these editing projects are motivated by religion—the edited “narratives” are often what religion scholars call “myths of origin”: This is where we came from and, therefore, this is the direction that we should take.

Thomas Berger, in his book War, Guilt and World Politics after World War II (2012), compares the way West Germans, Austrians, and Japanese dealt with the wartime atrocities committed by their respective countries (the author happens to be my son, but this should not prevent me from referring to a very interesting book). In each case the past was interpreted differently and a new national narrative was officially constructed. The Federal Republic (unlike Communist East Germany) confronted the facts, including the Holocaust, pretty much as an objective historian would (as defined by the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, an objective historian is a scholar who seeks to understand “wie es wirklich geschehen ist”—what really happened). There followed an official stance of profound apology (symbolized by Chancellor Brandt going down on his knees on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto), followed by a national narrative of democratic renewal. When Austrian independence was restored in 1945, the new state was based on what was at best a half-truth: Austria was “Hitler’s first victim”, did not exist as a state after 1938, and therefore could not be accountable for the crimes committed by the Third Reich (Berger quotes the joke that Austria tried to convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler a German.) It was only some decades later that the new state formally acknowledged that Austrians had played an important role in Nazi crimes, including especially the Holocaust, and developed a national narrative of penitence (though nobody quite fell to his knees) and democratic renewal. The Japanese are still struggling with the issue today. On the one hand, the government has expressed regret over the many war crimes, but many prominent politicians have downplayed this, there have been disputes about the history lessons in school textbooks, and an (objectively rather surreal) narrative of “Japan as a peace nation” was developed. The issues of what Berger calls “historical memory” still cloud today’s relations of Japan with China and South Korea.The most radical form of editing history is to simply delete from the official narrative the elements in the past that one wants to deny (for example, Holocaust denial). A famous modern case is the way successive editions of the official Soviet encyclopedia literally edited out of the text individuals declared to have been traitors (including inking them out of group leadership photos). But this is not just a modern phenomenon. In the 14th century BCE, during the brief reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten and his consort Nefertiti (whose amazingly beautiful statuette now stands in a Berlin museum), a radically monotheistic religion was established in Egypt. It is very likely, incidentally, that this monotheism influenced the religion of the ancient Israelites. When the Pharaoh died the priests of the old gods returned to power. They eradicated every trace of Akhenaten’s new religion, deleted every mention of the royal couple from all written documents, and physically destroyed any depictions or statuary (they fortunately missed one).If there were a competition for the most ghastly regime on earth today, I suppose that it would be a close contest between North Korea and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The horrors keep piling up—genocide of entire religious groups, massacres, torture, systematic sexual slavery. There has just been a report that no one less than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called “Caliph” of the Islamic State, had repeatedly raped Kayla Mueller, a captive American aid worker, whose photos show a prototype of the open-hearted young idealist. (ISIS announced that she had died in a coalition air strike. There is no reason to believe this.) But recently there have been reports of another type of atrocity, admittedly less horrific—the physical destruction or dismemberment of pre-Islamic antiquities, deemed to be idolatrous. I suppose this practice could be described as the murder of history. In mid-August 2015, the “Caliph’s” forces tortured and murdered Khalid al-Assaad, aged 83, the curator of antiquities in the recently captured Syrian city of Palmyra. The latter was one of the richest archaeological sites in the Middle East. As in other, similar sites, ISIS had begun its practice of physical destruction of pre-Islamic antiquities, but, its fanatical faith linked with ordinary greed, it wanted to keep some valuable objects not yet destroyed for sale on the illegal international art market. It appears that al-Assaad, despite being tortured, refused to reveal where some of these objects were hidden for safety. Thereupon he was beheaded and his headless body was publicly exhibited together with the severed head. If there were such a title, Assaad should be called a martyr of civilization, a witness against barbarism.But there are many instances where archeology is not the enemy, but serves a positive function, sometimes in the service of this or that ideology, which need not be directly political. An early example is that of Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), the scholar who first excavated the fabled Homeric city of Troy in what is now Turkey. Like many Germans, he had a romantic obsession with ancient Greece. I cannot vouch for the following story, but I cannot resist the temptation of telling it here: Schliemann was a bachelor and came to Greece to find a young wife who could speak classical Greek (he was appalled by what he considered the degenerate modern form of the language). He visited a girls’ secondary school in Athens where supposedly classical Greek was taught. Some girls were sent to him and asked to recite passages from Homer. He sat with his face to the wall—he didn’t care what they looked like—he listened attentively, and when he picked the one whose Greek was purest, he asked her father for her hand. It supposedly was a happy marriage, perhaps a folie a deux; she accompanied him on his digs, and was allowed to acquire some jewelry from excavated treasures.I just want to mention two contemporary examples of uses of archeology in “editing the past” for political purposes. (Whether one approves these uses will obviously depend on one’s view of the purposes in question.) In any case, there is no moral equivalence with the thoroughly evil project of ISIS.) The cases are those of Israel and Mexico.Israelis have been digging up their past ever since the establishment of the modern State of Israel in 1948. Moshe Dayan, one of the greatest Israeli generals, was an archaeologist before he became a military leader. For religious Jews, of course, the Holy Land was given to Abraham and his descendants. (However, if one looks at the territory defined in the deed—in Genesis 15:18—it is “from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.” In modern terms, this means from Egypt to Iraq, with every country in between. Even Benjamin Netanyahu and others committed to the vision of a Greater Israel might think that this is bit too much.) But even secular Jews, originally the majority of the Zionist founding fathers, are convinced that they are returning to their ancestral homeland, understood as roughly consisting of the territory of historic Palestine, believed to have been ruled by the undivided kingdom of David and Solomon. Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, speaks of “the land of our fathers” (which is why some Arab citizens of Israel refuse to stand up when the anthem is played). Most Israeli archaeologists pursue a rigorously objective science, bracketing whatever their religious or political beliefs may be. In this they walk in the footsteps of their European predecessors, many of whom were pious Christians who (openly or not) hoped that archaeology would prove the factual truth of the Bible (both Testaments).If the political subtext of Israeli archeology is to show that the Jewish presence in Palestine was there from way back, one can say that it has been quite successful. The excavation of Gezer, dating from the 10th century BCE, uncovered the oldest text in early Hebrew. The archaeological exploration of Tel Arad, which was a town in the early centuries CE, came upon a reference to a “House of Yahweh.” To that extent archaeology does show that the Zionists were indeed “returning” to a country with an ancient Jewish past. The most dramatic expression of this belief was their revival of the Hebrew language as a modern vernacular. There is of course the inconvenient fact that there is a gap of about two thousand years between the last Jewish state in Palestine and modern Israel—and that in the meantime many other people have settled in that country. There is then a counter-narrative to the Israeli one, that of the Arabs (who now simply call themselves Palestinians). Israeli Independence Day is when Palestinians commemorate the naqba (“catastrophe”), which displaced hundreds of thousands of their fathers from their homeland. The Palestinians’ cause does not need archaeology to prove their presence in the land; most of them are still there. There is a history of genuine suffering behind both narratives, and it is well to keep this in mind in looking at their clash. Behind the Zionist dream are centuries of anguish caused by anti-Semitism, culminating in the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust. The Palestinian dream of statehood is rooted in more recent suffering, arguably less terrible, but more pressing because it is still going on.The Mexican Revolution in the first half of the 20th century had neither an exact beginning nor an exact end. It was a chaotic and bloodthirsty affair, which settled down into an authoritarian regime with radical, centrist, and liberal factions, under a party founded in 1929 under a different name, later (and still today) called rather paradoxically the Revolutionary Institutional Party, or PRI. Mexico has become more democratic in recent times, and PRI has lost its old hegemony. The PRI regime developed an ideology of Mexican nationalism, which downplayed the Spanish aspect of the country’s history and emphasized its pre-Colombian elements—from the powerful Aztec empire in the Valley of Mexico south through various ethnic communities to the large Mayan region, which spills over from the Yucatan into the countries of Central America (notably Guatemala). These were rich and variegated cultures, some of which (including some of their languages) have survived to this day. They also left behind wonderful archeological sites, from Teotihuacan near Mexico City to Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Battalions of archeologists have been digging into these, with spectacular results. As in the archeological enterprise in Israel, many Mexican archeologists are motivated by apolitical scientific curiosity. Yet lavish government support for their work, not surprisingly, is politically motivated. The most impressive monument to this archeology is the splendid National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The well-known Mexican writer Octavio Paz, in his book-length meditation on the national culture, The Labyrinth of Solitude (1945), has a biting critique of the Museum; he calls it a celebration of the Aztec view of history. A more popular expression of the indigenous ideology is in the work of the so-called muralistas, who produced huge wall paintings depicting a version of Mexican history (Diego Rivera was the most famous), in the colorful style of “socialist realism.” The murals in the National Palace in Mexico City tell a straightforward story—the indigenous period is one of peace and tranquility, into which intruded the cruel Spaniards with their enslavement and rape of the indios, their violent religion, and their Inquisition. The Spanish part of this narrative is of course one-sided. The conquerors were indeed cruel, the huge mixed-race (mestizo) population is not just descended from consenting indigenous women who admired their Spanish conquerors. The Dominican Order did supervise the brutal machinery of the Inquisition, but it also produced the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who vigorously protested the enslavement of the indios, with some real successes. But the indigenous portion of the ideological narrative is even more removed from “what really happened.” One of the main characteristics of most if not all Mesoamerican cultures was the institution of human sacrifice, based on the belief that the gods require ongoing offerings of human blood. The Aztecs were especially enamored of this theology, and practiced it with enthusiasm. One chronicle describes a huge ceremony in Tenochtitlan (the indigenous city that preceded the Spanish Mexico City), when several thousand captives lined up, waiting to mount the central pyramid to be killed on the sacrificial platform. The Aztec empire conducted military campaigns with the special purpose of collecting new sacrificial victims. This probably explains why a small contingent of Spaniards successfully conquered the powerful Aztec state: They got a lot of support from other ethnic groups who did not relish their assigned role in the Aztec liturgy.Editing the past is not an exclusively religious project. Much of it has been. Danièle Hervieu-Léger is a contemporary French sociologist in a scholarly tradition that goes back to a work by Maurice Halbwachs (The Social Structure of Memory, 1925, English translation 1992). She speaks of “a chain of memory”; every religious community holds on to such a chain, which unites its members with a (possibly fictional) shared past and guides them into an imagined future. In a recent book she ascribes the decline of French Catholicism to many in its community having “forgotten” the memory.

Big Miss for Kremlin on Trade with China

As Russian President Vladimir Putin heads to Beijing to mark the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, all his brave talk of far-reaching economic cooperation with China is ringing increasingly hollow. At first, when Gazprom inked a $400 billion contract to supply cheap natural gas to a hungry Chinese economy, it looked like Russia might be having some success in boosting trade with the country. But trade between the countries was down in the first half of 2015, pushing Russia out of the list of China’s top 15 trading partners, as Bloomberg reports:

Russia, in pivoting toward China, is portraying closer relations as the emergence of a counterweight to the U.S. and Europe’s dominance. “Russian-Chinese ties have reached probably their highest level in history and continue to develop,” Putin said in a pre-visit interview with Tass and Xinhua released Sept. 1.

Economic data tell a different story. Trade between the two nations fell 29 percent in the first half of this year to $30.6 billion. Russian government officials now say that there’s virtually no chance they will hit their target of $100 billion in trade turnover this year, a goal Putin publicly embraced as recently as October. Putin in his interview didn’t mention the drop in trade this year.

This news comes a month after reports that Chinese direct investment in Russia shrank by 25 percent. As we observed at the time, China isn’t avoiding doing business with Russia for some complicated strategic reason. Russia just isn’t a very attractive place to invest these days.

But, in addition, China and Russia really aren’t natural partners, as TAI columnist Lilia Shevtsova pointed out in July. During the Cold War, the two great communist powers weren’t on particularly good terms. Today, aside from their opposition to American hegemony, the countries share few common interests. Russia, a net supplier of oil, likes it when oil prices are high; China, a net consumer, likes it when they are low. The nations share a border, and each seeks to carve out a sphere of influence in Central Asia. They may in a sense be more natural rivals with each other than they are with the United States. This is particularly true, ironically, when Washington isn’t being very assertive. We may be seeing some of that dynamic playing out in these numbers.

Violent Crime Wave Could Swamp Prison Reform

The violent crime rate is rising in many cities—and that could mean trouble for criminal justice reformers. The New York Times is the latest national media outlet to report on surging murder rates, pulling together data from local police departments into a striking set of opening paragraphs:

Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as [Milwaukee]. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.

More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago. In New Orleans, 120 people had been killed by late August, compared with 98 during the same period a year earlier. In Baltimore, homicides had hit 215, up from 138 at the same point in 2014. In Washington, the toll was 105, compared with 73 people a year ago. And in St. Louis, 136 people had been killed this year, a 60 percent rise from the 85 murders the city had by the same time last year.

To the annoyance of some ardent police critics, the Times article also aired the possibility that the spike in violent crime could be related to protests against police violence that have rocked the nation over the past year:

Among some experts and rank-and-file officers, the notion that less aggressive policing has emboldened criminals — known as the “Ferguson effect” in some circles — is a popular theory for the uptick in violence.

“The equilibrium has changed between police and offenders,” said Alfred Blumstein, a professor and a criminologist at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University.

Others doubt the theory or say data has not emerged to prove it. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, said homicides in St. Louis, for instance, had already begun an arc upward in 2014 before a white police officer killed an unarmed teenager, Michael Brown, in nearby Ferguson. That data, he said, suggests that other factors may be in play.

We aren’t criminologists at Via Meadia, so we won’t wade into the fierce debate about whether or not the “Ferguson effect” is real. In any case, focusing tightly on the relationship between crime and the protests over the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Freddie Gray strikes us as too narrow an approach. Even as these protests gained a lot traction this past year, the public had already begun to turn against many of the harsher elements of the U.S. criminal justice system, from stop-and-frisk to draconian prison sentences. Many state and local governments—including some of the ones mentioned in the Times story—have been scaling back certain tough-on-crime policies for the last several years.

Theories about the sources of the 2015 crime boomlet abound, but we wouldn’t be surprised if changes in criminal justice policy have played a role, at least in some cities. It may well be the case that the nationwide crime crackdown that began in the 1970s—as destructive as it was for many communities—really did help keep a lid on the crime rate. And it may well be that the steps taken toward reform in states like California—as salutary as they may be, overall, as a matter of policy—have caused urban crime to rise somewhat.For the purposes of public opinion, however, it may not matter whether the statistics in the Times article can be traced to the ‘Ferguson effect,’ changing prison policies, the availability of guns, or simple random variation. As we’ve written before, this is America’s prison reform moment. Politicians on both sides are united around the moral and fiscal imperative of curbing mass incarceration—and in particular, enacting more charitable policies toward drug and other nonviolent offenders. However, we only got here because the country has enjoyed historically low—and steadily falling—crime rates for the past decade. If the latest crime boomlet turns into a boom, the criminal justice reform consensus could evaporate in a heartbeat—no matter what the source of the boom may be.

China’s Carrier-Killer Ready for Its Close-Up

Beijing will mark the 70th anniversary of the Second World War by parading, for the first time, a new missile said to be capable of taking out aircraft carriers. With a range potentially extending more than 900 miles and a top speed faster than any counter-measures deployed to intercept it, the new DF-21D missile sounds like a fearsome weapon. Ashley Townshend, a University of Sydney research fellow, told the FT that “This is the missile that really does potentially encroach on US capability to deploy military power close to Chinese shores. It significantly raises the risks and costs.”

More background on the weapon can be found here, via the Diplomat:

The missile is mobile and fired from a truck-mounted launcher, making its detection more of a challenge. Most accounts have the weapon receiving guidance from over-the-horizon radar, satellites and other pieces of intelligence gathering technology. Many reports have the missile hitting its target, most likely a military vessel like an aircraft carrier, at a speed many times faster than sound (some say Mach 10 – 12). Scholars debate if present U.S. missile defenses can shield carriers against the weapon, especially if sea-based AEGIS naval platforms were also pressed to defend against sea and land-based cruise missiles simultaneously in numbers that could overwhelm the amount of interceptors available.

It is, of course, still unclear how functional this new weapon will be in the real world. The full slew of countermeasures available to the U.S. Navy is vast, and includes disrupting the complicated satellite guidance systems required to make the missile accurate. But if it does work, the premier instrument of American naval supremacy could be meaningfully blunted.

Chinese Lawyer Seized for Advising Christians

Beijing lawyer Zhang Kai was taken by police last week for advising Christians. He was in Wenzhou, a city that in many ways the ground zero for the government’s anti-Christian campaign to take down crosses and even whole churches. The NYT has :

Mr. Zhang was in Wenzhou advising a church when the police took him away last Tuesday, and they have since issued an order that could place him under secretive detention for six months, said Yang Xingquan, a colleague of Mr. Zhang’s from the Xinqiao Law Firm in Beijing. Mr. Yang, who was in Wenzhou looking for Mr. Zhang, cited information from the police and Christians in the city.

The police refused to allow Mr. Yang to see Mr. Zhang, and they did not explain why they had charged him with endangering state security and “assembling a crowd to disrupt social order,” Mr. Yang said. Mr. Yang said he believed that Mr. Zhang’s assistant, Liu Peng, and another legal worker, Fang Xiangui, were also in secretive detention in Wenzhou.

The harsher China’s crackdown on churches (and nonprofits, too), the more nervous you can be sure Chinese officials are feeling. The assault on Christian churches is a component of a wider campaign to solidify national identity and remove foreign influences (the government hopes, it appears, to revive indigenous philosophies and religions like Confucianism to counter the force of Christianity and Islam). This is a way of “battening down the hatches” and shoring up political support even as economic troubles beset the country and opposition to President Xi grows.

For their part, the churches seem to be responding with increasing assertiveness in protesting the government campaign. When you mix economic turbulence with this Christian pushback, you have a recipe for an even harsher crackdown, exactly as appears to be on display in this story. Expect to see more of this.

US Deploys F-22s and Drones to Eastern Europe

The United States European Command has taken steps to reassure NATO allies in Eastern Europe: On Monday, an American airbase in Germany sent two F-22s to Poland. This followed the deployment of two Predator Drones and 70 airmen for training exercises in Latvia. Reuters has the on the Latvia developments:

“This temporary deployment of aircraft and personnel … will test the unit’s ability to forward deploy RPAs (remotely piloted aircraft) and conduct air operations in an effort to help assure our Latvian allies, NATO allies and European partners of our commitment to regional security and stability,” the U.S. European Command said in a statement.

Poland’s newly-elected President recently accused NATO of treating the nation as a mere “buffer state” and had vowed to confront wavering members (not least of all Germany) at the next summit to increase the alliance’s commitment to its eastern flank.

Is NATO getting more serious about addressing the return of geopolitics? If the Ukraine crisis keeps simmering along at around the current intensity and Russia makes no lurches towards the Baltics, we may have to wait until the next Alliance summit, to be held in Warsaw next summer, to know for sure. In the meantime, we’re likely to see more fits, more starts, and more symbolic assurances from the United States meant to keep anxieties from reaching a fever pitch.

Can “Walking” Rigs Carry Shale at $45?

Shale producers are rolling out a new kind of oil rig that’s capable of moving from one well to the next…all on its own. Bloomberg reports:

Some of the newest rigs can travel hundreds of yards to the next well under their own power, lurching along like 150-foot-tall robots on hydraulic legs that raise the equipment five inches at a time, nudging forward at about a foot per minute. While that sounds slow, it is faster and cheaper than dismantling a rig and trucking the parts to a new site nearby.

More efficient drilling rigs that cost a third less than just a year earlier are changing the face of the U.S. shale industry, helping boost per-rig output in the four largest fields by at least 40 percent since the crude price plunge began in 2014.

Sure, the thought of an oil rig lurching from one pad to another on pneumatic stilts may sounds a little strange or even unsettling, but it’s one of many innovations that is helping shale producers keep the output up at levels well below what many predicted would be prohibitively cheap for fracking.

Much has been made about the dramatic drop in the U.S. rig count since the beginning of the year, but that metric is looking increasingly dated with the number of innovations the industry has produced. Rigs are able to drill multiple wells from one pad, and they’re able to do so quicker and ever more productively. Now, apparently, they’re able to move from one well to the next without requiring disassembly and transportation by truck, yet another time saver.These sorts of tweaks aren’t going to stop. The shale industry is going to continue to find ways to streamline processes that will enable it to continue to drill and turn a profit, even in today’s bearish market. And as good as that is for American energy security, it’s even worse for the Saudi-led OPEC strategy of choosing not to cut production in the hopes that U.S. fracking would fold first. That petrostate cartel is playing a high-stakes game of chicken with our shale producers, and those companies are showing no signs of backing down from the challenge.

The Democrats Might Have a Tea Party on Their Hands

The current presidential race—the orderly, if uneasy, Hillary Clinton coronation on one side, and the 16-candidate, Trump-dominated GOP scrum on the other—gives the impression that the Democrats are unified and the Republicans are in disarray. So did the last three Congressional races—in 2010, 2012, and 2014—when incumbent Congressional Republicans faced raucous primary challenges from anti-establishment outsiders, and Democratic primaries were generally much more tame and predictable.

But as President Obama’s tenure draws to a close, and internal divisions within the Democratic Party come out into the open, Democratic Congressional contests may be starting to heat up. The New York Times reports that “after several years of watching Republicans maul one another in primary battles, Democrats now have a few skirmishes of their own” in Senatorial races, even as GOP primaries calm down. The Times reports on several hotly contested Democratic primaries, but focuses on a recent mutiny among Illinois Democrats:

In Illinois, for instance, Representative Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat favored to take on the deeply vulnerable Republican senator, Mark S. Kirk, is feeling pressure from supporters of Andrea Zopp, former president of the Chicago Urban League. This month, Ms. Zopp told reporters, “Washington insiders won’t be telling voters of Cook County who they should choose.” […]

To topple Mr. Kirk, the Illinois senator, Democrats have largely lined up behind Ms. Duckworth, a disabled Iraq war veteran. But recently, Democrats in Cook County declined to endorse her after African-Americans criticized the national party’s early dismissal of Ms. Zopp, who is black.

If the Zopp-Duckworth example is representative, Bernie Sanders won’t be the only left-wing populist to give the Democratic establishment a headache in 2016. A large contingent of voters on the left, from “Black Lives Matter” activists to anti-Wall Street agitators, is mistrustful of party elites and generally disaffected with the status quo. These voters haven’t been able to unify behind a presidential candidate with a real shot at defeating Clinton—in part because the Democratic “bench” has been wiped out in midterm and off-year Republican routs—but there are many of them, and they are likely to to make establishment Congressional candidates squirm this primary season.

The fact that fissures among Democrats vying for Congress are only now beginning to emerge in a real way—and that the Party has largely marched in ideological lockstep over the past seven years, even as Republicans have splintered—points to one of President Obama’s under-appreciated strengths. He has been able to hold together the divergent elements of the Party—the social progressives and the economic populists, the anti-Washington grassroots activists and the major corporate donors—with impressive success, given the gulfs that separate their priorities. Even as factions of the Democrats have moved sharply to the left, Obama has been able to put a unified face on his coalition. But the president will no longer top the ticket in 2016.

This means intra-party divisions that were more-or-less effectively managed during the Obama years will increasingly come to the fore. We’ve written before about the blue civil war at the state and local level—for example, the way pension obligations are pitting the interests of public sector employees against those of low and middle-income voters who rely most on government services. The Times story highlights the fact that Democratic divisions also extend to competitions for national office, where liberal constituencies are increasingly clashing with a Party establishment that has so effectively set the agenda throughout President Obama’s tenure.

As these races start to get more coverage, the depth of the Party’s internal conflicts will likely become more apparent. The past six years of ferocious GOP infighting—and, of course, the circus quality of the Republican presidential race today—make it clear that the Republicans are far from unified. But neither are the Democrats. Both party establishments are extremely weak, and both party coalitions are in a serious state of flux. 2016 will be an interesting year.

Beijing Locking Up Hedge Fund Managers Now?

One of China’s top hedge fund managers was brought in for questioning by Chinese financial regulatory authorities and hasn’t been heard from since yesterday. The Financial Times:

The husband of Li Yifei, Man Group China head, denied that she was in detention. An earlier Bloomberg report saying she had been taken into custody by police in connection with the stock market probe into market volatility was “not accurate”, Wang Chaoyong, Ms Li’s husband, told the Financial Times.

“Li is in a meeting with [financial industry] authorities at the moment in the suburbs of Beijing,” he said, adding that the meeting was continuing from Monday and that “it sounds like there are a lot of people attending from foreign financial institutions”.Mr Wang said he did not know the purpose of the meeting, adding “it’s confidential, they are not allowed to turn on their phones”. But he said such encounters between foreign businesses and the Chinese market authorities were normal and he did not appear distressed about his wife’s situation. “I talked to her yesterday morning and the day before,” he said. “I haven’t talked to her today.”Man Group declined to comment on the situation.

Over the weekend, China locked up almost 200 people in connection with its new push to rein in “irresponsible” reporting of both the stock market crash and the Tianjin disaster. Among those locked up was a financial journalist who, according to the official Chinese mouthpiece Xinhua, has offered up a heartfelt apology, saying he “wrote a fake report on Chinese stock market based on hearsay and his own subjective guesses without conducting due verifications.”

It should surprise no one that the kind of monkey-business Beijing is engaging in, though it may have a certain political logic, isn’t curbing market volatility. Two key economic indicators were released today that stubbornly point down: Beijing’s Purchasing Managers’ Index came in at 49.7 in August, a three-year low (a value under 50 suggests a contraction of economic activity), while a similar measure, the Caixin/Markit PMI, which tracks smaller companies, was down to 47.3, its lowest value in more than six years. Markets in Asia and Europe closed solidly down on the news, and at time of writing U.S. indices were following in lockstep.The bumpy ride down continues.

Delegates Scramble to Pare Down “Bewildering” Climate Text

Negotiators have again descended on Bonn, Germany to kick off what looks to be an increasingly desperate scramble to pare down the bloated draft text delegates will be using at December’s climate summit in Paris. Things got off to a rough start, though, with UN climate chief Christiana Figueres telling those assembled that a scheduled meeting next month and the final summit itself had both yet to be paid for. “We don’t have the funding for participation for the October session or the [Paris summit]”, she said.

That’s hardly an encouraging opening announcement, considering that funding is one of the core stumbling blocks for the Global Climate Treaty. The two meetings are just a shade over one million euros short, a pittance compared to the whopping $100 billion annual fund that the developed world promised to pay into in order to help the developing world deal with the effects of climate change. So far the rich countries have only contributed just over $10 billion into that fund, a failure that you can be sure the developing world will bring up time and time again in Paris.In that light, failing also to secure full funding for talks that are now just weeks away is more than just a PR embarrassment for the UN—it’s a warning sign for the world’s already wary industrializing nations. In Bonn, Peruvian delegate Antonio Garcia stressed the need to keep the “broader picture” in mind during negotiations, warning that green goals must be brought “in line with sustainable development and poverty eradication.” That’s a widely-felt sentiment, especially in the world’s poorer countries, which worry that emissions reductions measures might depress economic growth.Kicking off this latest five-day session of talks, France’s ambassador to the UN climate process tried to strike an upbeat note, wishing “good luck to us all for this final marathon before December 11.” The word was in fact well chosen; with fewer than 10 days left to whittle down a document that’s been described as “bewildering”, negotiators seem to need all the luck they can get. We’ll be watching.